Clipperton, in partnership with Digimind, releases its European Innovation Financing newsletter covering the first half of 2016.

 

After reaching historical heights in H1 2015 driven by numerous mega rounds (e.g. Rocket Internet’s companies, Spotify’s $526m fund raising), with $5.9bn investments in H1 2016, the financing of the European ecosystem of innovation remained solid, considering the high basis of comparison. Over 630 transactions were announced in the first half of 2016, a record since 2013. Key trends highlighted in the report are:

  • Fewer large deals but a strong increase in the number of small and medium deals (below 30m$)
  • The UK has continued to increase its share: a pre-Brexit rally?
  • … partly as a result of the rise of Fintech, already accounting for 16% of the total of investments in innovation in Europe

Thibaut Revel, Partner at Clipperton in charge of the report wrote: “While technology companies valuations have quietly gone through a soft correction on public and private markets, there was an uncertainty on the evolution of the volume of investment poured into tech. Our H1 2016 report points out the resilience in Europe so far, with an increase in the investments in small and medium deals offsetting the slowdown in large rounds. Data from multiple sources show that VC investments have declined in the US, and even more in Asia. Considering the high basis of comparison in H1 2015, there is a decline in deal value in H1 2016 in Europe, however, it’s too early to tell whether Europe will or not resist better than the US. The full year figures for 2016 should enable to clarify this trend.

 

Although the second part of the year will be dominated by the uncertainties caused by the Brexit, most of the large tech investors remain committed to continue to invest in European tech companies including in the UK. However key questions remain: is London still the best city to launch a global fintech company? Will existing UK-based start-ups suffer from an outflow of entrepreneurs, engineers and highly qualified talents?

 

These uncertainties are detrimental with the UK being the #1 growth engine of tech investment in Europe attracting 37% of the continent’s investments in H1 2016. Everybody should work to keep the engine on.”

 

The next report will be published in January 2017 with updated 2016 Full Year figures.

 

Click here to download the newsletter.

 

Contacts

Clipperton
Thibaut REVEL, Partner, trevel@clipperton.net
Martin VIELLE, Senior Associate, mvielle@clipperton.net

 

About Clipperton

Clipperton is a European independent corporate finance advisory firm exclusively dedicated to the Technology space, advising innovative companies on M&A transactions, debt financings and equity offerings. With offices in London, Berlin, and Paris and an international reach, Clipperton is a European leader in Technology financial advisory. Over the past 15 years, the team has successfully completed more than 150 high profile transactions globally.

 

About Digimind and WhoGotFunded.com

Digimind is a SaaS intelligence software company based in Paris, Boston and Singapore, providing advanced information management platforms and technologies that perform massive data collection, automatic intelligence extraction and visualisation. Using its unique web mining expertise, Digimind developed WhoGotFunded.com, the world’s most comprehensive funding database, discovering over 100 fresh funding deals every day in real time all across the world.